


Truth Over Olives

by mystivy



Category: Tennis RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23610742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mystivy/pseuds/mystivy
Summary: A conversation between Rafa and Maribel while they're quarantined at home due to coronavirus unexpectedly gets to the truth of things.
Relationships: Roger Federer/Rafael Nadal
Comments: 19
Kudos: 101





	Truth Over Olives

At first, they watched the news in the evening, just as they were preparing dinner, and every evening they ate with the numbers ringing in their heads. Instead, now, they catch up in the mornings and then try to put it out of their heads for the rest of the day. “What good does it do dwelling on it?” his father asks, and he’s right, it does no good at all. So Rafa makes encouraging videos, feeling it incumbent upon himself to be an example of positivity, and posts them online, where they proliferate and do their job, and he can sink back into the gloom of these endless, dull days. All with the acute feeling that he has no right to this depression, no right at all. There are people much worse off than this, people who don’t have a gym in the basement and a pool in the backyard, people who don’t have a view out over the sea to watch when the TV gets too much and who don’t have comfortable chairs to sit in on a patio spacious enough to play tennis on. Mini tennis, but tennis, nevertheless.

“Here,” says Maribel, holding out the olives to him. They’re spiking them straight from the tub with forks under the pale clouds of the late afternoon. “Monte Carlo would be starting tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Rafa says. The olives are stuffed with feta and red peppers and they’re coated in a garlic and rosemary olive oil. They’re good, even though they’ve been in the fridge for a week. “Well. Monte Carlo will be there next year.”

“It just sucks,” Maribel sighs. She always liked Monte Carlo in particular. They both did. So close to home both geographically and in feeling, a port town on the Mediterranean, blue sea and red clay, the smell of old stone in the sunshine and winding flowers on trellises, and always, the hush of the sea. “We should take the boat next year. The new one. Stay on it during the tournament.”

Rafa had considered that before but it had seemed less practical than staying in a hotel near the club. Now, though, he can’t see why he’d quibble over a little impracticality. “Okay,” he agrees. “But you have to sleep on the deck. There isn’t room for everyone.”

Maribel hits his arm with her fork and then spikes another olive. “Then give me the Beethoven, you selfish asshole.”

He licks the imprint of oil her fork left on his skin, spitting out a rosemary leaf when it sticks to his tongue. “Fine, we’ll take both boats.”

“Good,” she says, as if he’s finally being reasonable after a protracted period of stubbornness. She sighs. “What’s going on in the group chat? Any more scandal?”

Rafa lets Maribel read the ATP chat, usually. She’s far more interested in the nonsense there than he is. He unlocks his phone and hands it to her, and she scrolls through something like fifty messages on the chat. “Oh wow, did Stan ask Benoit about having sex before a tournament?”

Rafa looks at her, eyebrow raised and shrugs. “You think I fucking know?” he asks, reaching for the tub of olives that she’s forgotten now she has his phone. “I don’t watch the Instagram stories or whatever.”

“Well, I’m going to,” says Maribel. She opens his Instagram and searches for Stan’s stories. He half listens while she watches the conversation in French. “They’re both kind of skeevy,” she says. “But they really know how to do social media.”

“You think?” Rafa says. The sea is making him feel lazy but Stan and Benoit’s conversation is irritating him. He doesn’t have the patience to sit around watching long videos on Instagram. “Roger’s is better. At least it’s about tennis.”

“Oh, the volleying one? I saw that.” Maribel keeps watching Stan and Benoit until she loses interest and goes back to the chat. “I guess you’re not going to do Andy’s challenge? You’d have to do it with Mery.”

“What challenge?” Rafa asks. He’s full now, just eating olives out of boredom.

“You have to do one hundred volleys with your partner. I mean, Andy did it with Kim, and Novak did it with Jelena. It’s like a husband-wife thing, I guess.”

Rafa flops his head to the side to look at her, one eyebrow raised at the improbability of him doing anything with Mery for social media. 

“I don’t know why you’re so weird about that,” Maribel says. “It’s just an Instagram video.”

“Yeah, well,” Rafa replies. Lethargy is stealing over his skin and into his bones.

“What would you do if someone asked you if you’d had sex an hour before a tournament?” Maribel asks, handing the phone back to him.

“I’d answer. Tell them everything,” Rafa replies, deadpan.

She snorts. “Right. Won’t play tennis with Mery, but is fine talking about sex with Mery.” She laughs at the idea.

Rafa shifts in his chair. A mistake, because Maribel is as perceptive as a hawk. 

“Ahhh,” she says, after a moment. “It wasn’t Mery, huh? I should have known.”

“I’m not gonna tell you, either, so there’s no point asking,” Rafa says. 

She’s quiet for a moment, reaching over to take back the tub of olives. “Roger texted you while I was scrolling,” she says.

Rafa huffs a sigh. His impatience isn’t at Roger. It’s at Maribel, leaping to conclusions as usual, and also as usual, getting it right. He ignores her and opens his phone. It’s Roger replying to Rafa’s own reply to Roger sending him the video of the guy doing the volley challenge against the wall while wearing a t-shirt with Rafa’s logo. 

“What did he say?” Maribel asks.

“You mean you didn’t read it, you nosey cow?”

“Shut the fuck up. No, I didn’t read it. What did he say?”

Rafa reads it again. “Just says he’s doing okay. The kids are good. It’s not too cold to go outside and train most days.”

She stares at him, an olive half way to her mouth. “Is that it?”

Rafa shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “What? What did you expect?”

She bites down on the olive. “I don’t know,” she says, chewing. “More than that, though. If I thought it was gonna be that lame, I would have read it.”

“How is that lame?” Rafa opens up the text again. It seems pretty normal to him.

“Because… you know. Don’t you miss him?”

The rise of emotion inside him is sudden, that hollow-chested feeling of something too strong to name. “I…” he tries, but he can’t quite say anything right now, not while that tide is still high in him. His cheeks burn.

“Sorry,” Maribel says. She reaches over and squeezes his arm. “Rafael. I’m sorry.”

He nods, staring with wide eyes at the sea, seeing nothing.

“I know we don’t talk about it. It’s just… well, it’s different now, isn’t it? Everything is different.”

“Yeah,” he says, through a tight throat. “I guess.”

She goes quiet, distracting herself by carefully fitting the lid of the tub back on to cover the two lonely olives they’ve left in the oil and rosemary at the bottom. She sighs when she’s got it done and it really can’t be fixed on any tighter. “You really text each other bland stuff like that?” she asks.

Rafa is sliding his phone between his thumb and his middle finger, turning it over and over against his knee. The overwhelming feeling in his chest has subsided a little, leaving a kind of numbness in its wake. “What else are we supposed to say?” 

“I don’t know,” Maribel shrugs. “I kind of thought you guys would sext, if anything.”

Rafa sighs with impatience. “We don’t.”

Maribel rests her chin on her hand, her elbow on the arm of the chair. “What about feelings, then?”

Another sceptical eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about.” Maribel’s voice has gone quiet. “Don’t you text him real stuff? About how you feel.” She lays her hand on his forearm again, squeezing gently. “All this, it’s kind of a rehearsal, isn’t it? For how it’s going to be someday, when neither of you is playing anymore.” She squeezes his arm one more time, then she stands up, leans down to kiss him on the cheek, and picks up the tub of olives. “Anyway.” She stands there, looking at him for a silent moment. He can’t meet her eyes. “Hey, you want a beer? I bet Dad would like a beer.” She’s gone before he can answer.

She’s not saying anything he hasn’t already thought. This is what it’s going to be like someday, when they’re both in their homes and they can’t sneak off together, find an hour here or there to have sex or an evening to have dinner before returning to their real lives. They still call it that, when they roll out of bed, even if they’ve spent a whole weekend together. _Back to real life_. Rafa doesn’t remember ever deciding that’s how they should do things, or that what they had wasn’t real life, it just evolved that way. They’ve had breaks before, usually when he’s injured, or a couple of years ago when Roger was out with his knee, but it’s never felt like this before. It’s never felt so final.

Now, for all his talk about positivity, he would crawl out of his skin if he could, slither out of himself and escape the confines of this house and garden, find a place to be _elsewhere_. Find a place to be with him.

He unlocks his phone and opens WhatsApp. Roger’s message sits there, fresh and innocent as an edelweiss in a Swiss meadow, no hint of the earthy truth beneath it. No hint of the days and nights together, the things they whisper to each other in the dark.

 _Hey_ , he types. _Roger, I miss you._

It seems to stupid. So trite. But nevertheless, it’s true.

Before he can overthink it, he presses send.


End file.
